Portlandia, "buying a cell phone"

Anna tipped me off to the TV comedy Portlandia. It's rather out there, so it took a little while to wake up to it (even that it's a sketch show), but I find it very funny. And it's clearly a hit, seeing how high it appears in suggestions when you start typing "portland" in Google.

Minister pushes for ban on 'pornographic miniskirts'

[Thanks to Susie Bright]

Minister pushes for ban on 'pornographic miniskirts', article.

Indonesia's powerful Religious Affairs Minister believes miniskirts are pornographic and should be banned under tough new anti-pornography laws.
In comments embraced by the country's top Islamic advisory body, Suryadharma Ali said that ''one [criterion of pornography] will be when someone wears a skirt above the knee''.

Different … Balinese would be excluded from the laws. Photo: AP

''Of course there are some exceptions for places like Bali and Papua. Balinese women, for instance, they have a unique way of dressing; the upper part of their traditional dress [does not cover their shoulders] but it's not pornography. They also dance gracefully and it's not considered pornography..."

So if we could teach porn stars to dance gracefully (not likely, I admit), then we may gain a beachhead. 

Then of course, if all they were allowed is to show their shoulders, then penthouse.com might see a drop in sales. 

It is very weird to me that you think you have a bullet-proof definition of something, like "porn" is "sexually explicit communication", and then it turns out that everybody *still* defines these things *so* differently! To some people, seeing a woman's thighs is actually "sexually explicit", and no amount of arguing can make them see it differently. 

Twitter hyper, and what is important

This may be... whatever, but it strikes me: people who use Twitter, read and write, constantly... every day, many, many times a day, and use it every time they have two minutes free, and often if they don't... doesn't this just have a strong whiff of hyper-activity? The sort of thing we give school kids Ritalin for?

I'm not saying it is wrong, and I have a lot of these addictions myself, but I do think that obsessively skating as fast as you can on the surface of things (140 characters is superficial), in constant anxiety of missing what has been going on for the last hour you were away, indicates a mental state of inability to sit still, and to consider the deeper and less Right-Now-related issues of life.

And intuitively I feel that the very most important issues in Life, The Universe, and Everything are things which do not happen and disappear within an hour or a day, but which have relevance over hundreds, even thousands of years.

For example: what the current president has done today is less important than what he does over his career. And a specific president is less important than the basic beliefs and principles of politics. Which is less important than how democracy works, for example, and whether democracy really is the best form of government, and if not, what is.

Beyond that comes things like what is a good citizen? What is a good human being? Hey, what is a human being?! What's our relationship to the world and the universe? What is my purpose ultimately?

You'll notice these questions become more and more difficult/impossible to give short or simple answers to, and they stretch over more and more time in relevance, and they rise in importance.

Such questions also tend to induce great existential anxiety, which is for real and very uncomfortable, and for this we take pills, or large doses of TV, or Twitter.

The Dentist of Jaipur

I'm so thankful for First World dentistry.
The Dentist of Jaipur. Notice, the sidewalk dentist has a double thumb!

Self-Driving Car Test

This is early days, but I really hope that this technology won't be held back too long by social fears and conservatism, I really feel that it will be a great boon not only to special customers, but to society as a whole. It will save a lot of time as stress for many people (how many people dream of the gift of one or two hours extra per day to read, play, or work? And how many are seriously stressed just by driving?).
And once it becomes advanced and becomes the norm, it will surely also save an enormous proportion of the yearly traffic deaths and injuries.

The new fine eating

New Girl and Zooey again

The New Girl, TV show, is growing on me. Well okay, sometimes it's funny, and sometimes it's just a bit strange. But it always has... Zooey.

Here's a strange thing, one of many she tried to get out of being really bad at sex.  I like it, it's ridic and hot at the same time.

G.I. Joe heaven

[Thanks to Dave]

Un-be-friggin-lievable!
What blows my mind is that this is only the first part of an eighteen-part series about one person's collection of one toy!

Obey Hello Kitty

Shepard Fairy made the famous Obama red/blue poster, and the "Obey Giant" sticker. I think this kitty is one of his best though. It's funny, and combines simple graphic impact with more subtle rich visual complexity.

Harrods has the plasma for you

[Thanks to TCG]

If you’re in the market for a $1 million TV, Harrods has the plasma for you, article.
Already have a TV that's the size of — and costs as much as — a beachfront mansion? Harrods' electronics department also sells a $480,000 speaker dock for the iPhone and the iPad that stands 11' tall, and features a built-in ladder that you can use to climb up and connect your device on top.

ROTFL. Good flippin' grief.

Well.... you know, Asian women are pretty small...

Director Cameron starts record-setting Pacific dive

Director Cameron starts record-setting Pacific dive, article and two short videos.

He collected samples for research in marine biology, microbiology, astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics, and captured photographs and 3D moving images.
[...] The water pressure at the bottom is a crushing eight tons per square inch -- or about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.

It must be a challenge to make porthole glass which can withstand that pressure,  and  be optically perfect for the cameras.

The Net shortens attention spans

We've talked a bit about how how, seemingly, the Net shortens attention spans. Or at least such a phenomenon has come about remarkably coincidentally with the rise of the Net.
Timo wrote this on the subject:

The shortening of attention span for Internet users is caused by dopamine addiction.

Discovering new information, i.e. an interesting site/page, gives a "rush" caused by the release of dopamine, the body's feel good chemical. Over time, you get desensitised to this "euphoric" effect, making you want to experience it more often.  Clicking your mouse then effectively becomes a dopamine release switch.

Except when you click only to find spam or some otherwise uninteresting information.  This results in withdrawal symptoms, making you want to click your mouse even more in order to get your fix.

So, if, upon discovering and interesting page, you find that you end up reading only the ingress of it, and then already feel the need to search for some other interesting information, you are addicted.

The key here is that the dopamine rush happens at the point of  discovery. Not when actually consuming the information.

-

Summer weather today (updated)

I've been a bit disdainful of the claim that LCD screens are no good in bright weather. Well, it turns out that's because we so rarely get really bright weather here in Northern UK! But today it was, astonishingly bright, and contrasty. And I really couldn't see anything on the screen in some places. So I was glad that the Fuji X10 also has an optical viewfinder.
I had to stand in the middle of the street to get this. What's life and limb compared to the chance of aaaarht.

(Click for big pic on both)

I think they each have separate merits. The color version has the rich interplay of hues in the red/umbra area. But the B/W one has the focus on the strong graphical show of the lines and composition of the dark shapes.

====
Fuji X10. Set on EXR (pixel-combining) for dynamic range, but honestly I think the effect it subtle. I wish it had in-camera HDR like the Pentaxes and the iPhone. The EXR is better in low light, I think. 

Car math

[Thanks to Charles]

Okay, a little cruel, but funny.

A Fire Upon the Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep is the kind of SF I like. It is not an excuse for The Human Heart's Struggle With Itself, or about somebody's conflict with his father, it's a big story with very cool ideas. An example is an alien species, which looks like a large dog mostly. And when you have just one, it's about as intelligent as a dog too. But when they run in their native state, small packs, they communicate by hyper-sound signals, and their minds build up into a super-mind, very intelligent and civilized. If the pack gets separated beyond how far sound can reach, the mind breaks down. 

Another example is the idea that the closer you get to the galactic center, the more thought and radio-communication slow down, and vice versa. So nearer the centre, it is more primitive and very slow, but outwardly you have some super-civilizations which the main galaxy have no chance of even understanding. 

Upcoming video pan stand

Not a product yet, but it could have many cool uses. Article. Kickstarter page.

A Titanic mistake

They're re-releasing Titanic, so I just saw the trailer for the first time. It was even more gawd-awful than I had imagined. It's hard to think of a movie I'd have less desire to watch. Maybe Passion Of The Christ with an all-poodle cast. Or Yentl And Zombies. Or a film about the love life of Darth Vader when he was young. Wait, somebody did that. Still a bad idea.

Kyra Gordon - Come on Home

[Thanks to Lou]

Apparently she is singing the sax part of the song.

This is what a camera looks like

I'll tell ya sommin that it seems only Fuji and Olympus have become aware of: there's a pretty big demographic, those of us who photographed before 1980, who miss their Real Cameras.
Today's plastic Wunders are not machines, they are blobs.
And that, apart from good performance, is what will make the new Olympus OM-D sell like hotcakes to old-timers:

to us, this is a camera: 

to us, this is not a camera. It doesn't look serious: 

(Obviously, performance is irrelevant to this emotional stance, most of those blobs are actually amazing cameras.) 

My collection of vintage metal cameras in my living room testifies to this love affair. And now somebody has finally, after over a decade, realized that there is a solid niche there, and I can get the best of both worlds, my metal-addiction scratched and very good  digital performance, in the same machine.
And I'll bet it's not just old-timers either, I'll bet many younger people have an affinity for solid machined metal, rather than Fisher-Price toys, even if they are black and heavy.

Vancouver mountains

Our reader Ray yesterday took this spectacular panorama of Vancouver mountains close to where he live. It was taken with a Pentax 70 super-zoom camera at longest setting (24x no less, that's almost impossible to do without a tripod), and stiched together with Image Composite Editor.
If you want the full-sized file it is here. (You can click on the picture too, but Blogger will not post pictures larger than 1600 pixels, which is tough on panoramas.)

Warning: I made two halves of the big version and put them on my twin monitors as wallpaper, and soon after my Mac crashed. This is rare, and even more rare, almost unheard of, is that it wouldn't start properly after that. I tried a few things, and after starting from a different hard disk, I removed the two pictures I had as wallpaper. (I got suspicious because of the timing and because it froze right after loading the wallpaper.)  And then it started properly again. I've never encountered anything like that before. And it's hardly likely to have anything to do with the original file, since I had saved it as two different and separate JPGs. But still, to be safe, maybe you shouldn't use it as wallpaper...
(Of course if anybody can explain how a JPG (made by Save As in Photoshop) can prevent a computer from booting, I'm all ears.

What is happiness?

I have just found out what happiness is!

I had a dream where I was in a café in Copenhagen, and a girl came in who looked exactly like Alyson Hannigan. She walked up to met and said she was there to meet me, and to look outside, something amazing was there. I followed her, and indeed there was something amazing: one more girl looking just like Alyson Hannigan, also there to meet me!
We had a great time. At one point the first one was wearing a leather hip harness on top of her jeans. Sexxxxy.
So that is happiness: a date with two Alyson clones!

She is no Megan Fox, but really I prefer Alyson.

Here is a more day-to-day Alyson: (girls are so lucky, they are allowed, heck, expected to make themselves glamorous with make-up. The rest of us are stuck with the face nature handed out.)

Abundance is now

We always hear and feel that things are going worse and worse. And yet, people "below the poverty line" today have luxuries that barons and kings did not have 200 years ago. And the trend continues.



And Peter Diamandis on the wealth in space:

1939 Rolls-Royce Phantom

1939 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Cabriolet, post.

Columbus Day

Tintin, mocap

Tintin has just been released on blu-ray, and I'm watching it.
Is it just me, or is this the most realistic mocap/CGI movie released yet? For sure it's a quantum leap ahead of A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey. While that one couldn't fool anybody, I have to wonder how many people go into the Tintin movie innocent, and never glom onto the fact that it's not live-action. It's amazing, both humans and scenery looks Real, and there's nothing of that weird fakeness of movement which earlier came from motion capture (counter-intuitive as that is).

It may not quite have knocked down the fortress of ultra-realism in CGI, but it sure has taken down a couple of the outer walls, and shaken the foundations!

St. Patrick's day logo on Google

(At least on Google UK. I think I heard they do this more than Google USA.)

Melanistic (All Black) Animals

Melanistic (All Black) Animals, post.
Kewl.
Notice the interesting site it's on, TwistedSifter.com. (Thanks to Henry.)

"Melanism is an undue development of dark-colored pigment in the skin or its appendages and is the opposite of albinism."

How creativity is being strangled by the law

The $8 billion iPod

V. funny.
Do you know what "copyright math" is? Find out!

A Shot At Love 2 With Tila Tequila

Wow, I think we are breaking new ground for how fake and bad TV can be.
"I just want love!" Urgh. This is just shockingly bad.

Lenses and sensors

From this post:
You would think that either the lens or the sensor has the highest resolution, and only improving the other one would improve the results. But that is not so, improving either one will improve detail, unless the gap is really huge.

This means for example that upgrading to a 22MP camera from a 12MP one may get you more detail even if you don't have the very best lenses.

Robin Wong pics

Robin Wong, who states he is just having fun with it, comes out with some cool images while just testing a camera.

-----
By the way, he says that for the first time ever, with the E-M5 he can take sharp pictures at one half second, due to the new "5-axis" stabilization. Impressive.

Why not M4/3?

I wonder why basically only Panasonic and Olympus, still, have joined Micro Four Thirds. Why not Sigma, Pentax, Sony, and Fuji (I don't even include Nikon and Canon, they are ultra-separatist)? Is it a kind of ego thing, they have to "be their own man" as a corporation? If they joined M4/3, they could immediately sell camera bodies to people who have the lenses. And if they make good lenses as time goes on, these may be bought by people who have bodies from other manufacturers.

For example, the otherwise very interesting Fuji X1-Pro (or maybe X-Pro1, sigh*.) is hampered by only having three lenses so far, and no zooms. It takes tonnes of money and time to develop a good lens line. Why not join up to an already strong lens line? And the sensor size is almost the same anyway. Why all this super-pride.


*As said in a review of the new Canon G1X: 

Just a few months ago when I reviewed the Panasonic GX1 I joked about the number of new cameras with X in their names. This then included the Leica X1, Canon 1DX, Samsung NX200, Fujifilm X-10, Ricoh GXR, Casio EX15, Olympus XZ1, Sigma DP2X, Sony HX9V – and that's with just one model from each company. Since then, in addition to the Panasonic GX1 and the new Panasonic X series lenses we have had the Fuji X1 Pro and now the Canon G1X. 
-

Olympus 75mm F:1.8, and portraits

[Thanks to Bert]

Olympus is planning to release a 75mm F:1.8 lens. A bit long for a portrait lens, equivalent of 150mm in 35mm terms, but could be used for that and might be an interesting multi-purpose tele, and it's fast. And surely it'll be of the same excellent quality as the other prime (non-zoom) lenses Olympus has released recently.

And here is where the Micro Four Thirds format is really beginning to show its strength: much smaller lenses. This lens is not far from 200mm-equivalent in reach, and it is slightly faster than Nikon's famous monster of a 200mm F:2.0 lens. And compare the size! (The Olympus E-M5 body is even smaller than the Nikon body, so the Oly lens must be around a quarter of the size.) And the Nikon lens weighs almost three kilos! (and costs over five grand.) That's not a great lens for hand-holding, whereas the Olympus lens clearly is.

By the way, I once took some portraits with a 135mm lens (it was on film so I used a tripod even in pretty good light. What a blessing ISO 1600 is.), and one of the models (Memo, top) made an interesting comment: that with the greater distance the tele lens made for, the camera's presence was far less imposing and intruding than with a shorter lens.

I had to be over five meters away to get these half-body portraits, so such a lens is a bit long for constrained spaces.

Below, this was the kit I used, Pentax ME Super. A wonderfully compact and useful kit, I loved it. A classic camera. (Came out late seventies, clearly inspired by the Olympus OM cameras (like the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 is), and the same size almost to the millimeter.)

Update, Bruce found this site to compare sizes. Here's another good comparison between a DSLR and a M4/3. Nikon D90 with 85mm 1.4, and Olympus E-M5 with 45mm 1.8. The Nikon lens is a bit faster, but only half a stop (they didn't have the 1.8 version):

Scale of the Universe

[Thanks to TidBITS]

Scale of the Universe, interactive demonstration on NASA. (Requires Flash.) That is fun.

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses, article.

244 years in continual publication!! And the digital age has ended it. If that doesn't illustrate the power and pervasiveness of digital publication...

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a Chicago-based company, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

You can't argue with that, a paper book is a bitch to update! Especially one the size of EB. Whereas any bit of a web site can be updated in minutes. And these days, data and knowledge changes so fast, that nothing is too fast.

A mobile studio

It seems Cali Lewis is moonlighting with some outside gigs (Her normal one is at geekbeat.tv). The web may, historically viewed, still be in the Gold Rush age, but people still have to work hard.

I think this is an interesting look at how a lean and mean mobile video studio can be run.

Now, at first I had imbedded the video, but it has the irritating trait that it starts playing automatically every time you load the page. This would be particular irritating when it's lower on the page, and you have no clue where the sound is coming from. So I'll make do now with a link, watch it here.

George Carlin - Saving the Planet

[Thanks to Anna]

The man had guts.



I like the idea that maybe we are here just because the planet needed plastic but could not make it on it's own.
I just wish most plastic bags weren't friggin white, it really looks ugly in amongst the browns and greens and in photos (it always blows out the highlights!).     :-)

The new Olympus OM-D (updated)

[Thanks to Bert]

Update:
His series has been updated with a final segment, about street photography.
Look at the picture below. I think it's a good picture (rare, good use of foreground blur), and also a good example of the usefulness of the touch-and shoot screen on this camera. Normally a camera focuses somewhere in the center. May with one which has face-recognition you would actually get focus on this lady. But another way is, with cameras which have it, to touch the screen live where you'd like to focus, and the camera shoots instantly (if that feature is turned on).

You might think that it would make for camera shake. But I find that with a bit of attention, it's not hard to hold the camera still while doing this.
--
I must admit I'm pleased to see this new camera arrive. I admit love compact cameras like the Olympus Pen, but one has to admit they are not really substitutions for professional cameras in some situations. This new one uses the same lenses, M4/3, of which some really good ones are coming out now, and it's more hardy, faster, has more features, better sensor, all around it's just a powerful camera, while still being smaller and lighter than traditional SLR cameras. I think something like this will be the new level of work cameras very soon.

Photo blogger Robin Wong has tested the interesting new Olympus OM-D EM5 camera. Video and article.
See video here with comments on dynamic range and high ISO capabilities. Both seem to be very good. (See video low on the page, he claims clean ISO 6,400!) (Almost a full stop improvement every year, this is astounding. In the film days it was maybe a stop per 20 years.)

... From the simplicity of his methods of work (no tripod, small hand-held flash), he is really getting great results. He praised Olympus' new 5-Axis Image Stabilization system, which also stabilizes the screen and viewfinder when using Live View, this was not before possible with body-based stabilization.

Another review:

Notice the touch-shutter. You just touch on the tiltable screen where you want to focus, and if you've selected it, it shoots too. And it shoots immediately, the focus is so fast. This is similar to the Panasonic GH2, I think it's great. 

Snow art as exercise

[Thanks to Tommy]

Apparently Simon Beck's motivation for walking for hours to create these kewl snow artworks is exercise.
Some are the size of three football fields!
What I wanna know is how does he plot them so precisely? ... Aha, apparently he uses surveying techniques. Impressive.

Talking Heads: Papa Legba

And the version from True Stories (an old fave movie) (though this is hardly representative):

Readability again

These days, if I don't post a article to Instapaper for leisurely reading on my iPad, I usually just hit the key combo for Safari's "Reader" service. So I had almost forgotten about the Readability service. But I've reinstalled it now, and it actually kick Reader's butt, simply because it's so much more flexible. You can finetune everything, margins, text size, and background colour... For example, I love reading on the cream background I've selected. (There are only a few to select from. I'd have preferred stepless selection, but fortunately that cream one ("ebook" it's called) seems to hit the spot for me.)

Safari Reader:

Readability:

(More about the Siri article, if you're curious.) 

A TED speaker's worst nightmare

Weird. Funny. It looked planned, except that this guy looked genuinely stumped and baffled.
Maybe they had just planned to do this (spinning beachball show)  in case it happened to one of their speakers.



Update: Aha, thanks to Ken for this article about the prank.

By the by, I read once that in OSX the spinning beachball does not mean "unexpected delay" as much as "this will take a moment, but you can now do tasks in other apps while it's going on". I am not sure if that's just a spin, but I do think that back in OS9, you couldn't do anything at all while a spinning cursor was showing.

By the by 2, have you noticed that interface elements tend to be abstracted into god's blue beyond when they are copied or remade? Tivo has a derivative of the spinning beachball where the coloring is so subtle that you have to look closely to notice that the thing is spinning at all.
And in early Mac OS versions, like OS 6, the active window had clean black striping symbolising a grip surface to show that here is where you grabbed if you wanted to move the window. In OS 8 and 9, these got grey tones and became less visible. In early OSX, they were transformed so they looked more like faint pin-striping. And now they are just gone. (In fact I have always thought that in OSX the visual difference between an active window and other windows is just way too subtle. It's just a shade darker grey is all.)

"Gherkin" and how to use a lens

This is the London building popularly known as "The Gherkin". I am sure many people hate it, that's always true of the radically different. But at least you can't say that it does not make an impression! It's only from 2004, but already one of the most famous buildings in London, always used in films etc, like the Eiffel tower is for Paris.

Here's a whole 'nuther thing though, if you look at the full-resolution image on Wiki, you'll notice that at 100% (called "pixel-peeping", because in print you often don't notice the flaws which look so blatant on the screen at 100%), the top of the building looks awful, blurred.

I thought, "that must be a cheap or old digicam". But the high resolution said otherwise, so I got curious and looked further.

And it turns out that it was taken with the 3,000-dollar Canon 5D2, and the 2,000-dollar lens Canon 24mm F:3.5 Tilt-Shift. Good gear! Professional gear.
So why is it so blurry on the main subject? (And why the heavy vignetting, dark corners?)  Well, the guy had his camera set at Aperture Priority, and set at full aperture, 3.5. And no lens in the world is at its best at full aperture, not even such an expensive one. Some lenses are good enough at full aperture, but they are always better stopped down a couple of stops. (F:8.0 is usually one of the best settings, re sharpness.)
Further, he or the camera may have focused on the building in the foreground [Update: T/S lenses don't have autofocus, thank Andreas]. Though I'm not sure how big a difference that made at that distance.

Basically, unless you need to isolate your subject with background blur, or you're forced by poor light (not the case here, it was taken at 1/2000 sec), don't use your lens at full aperture if you want optimum sharpness.
Funny thing is that if the photographer had chosen to just let the camera select the settings, at "P", Program, setting instead of Aperture Priority, it would probably have selected something around 8.0 and 1/500th second instead, much more fitting.

Update:
Bert said:

...what really bothers me is how the perspective on the buildings in the foreground is so wrong. The tower in the center and rightmost (hotel-like) building really look like they are repelling each other!
I wonder if this is caused (or at least enhanced) by the extreme setting of the lens? I really don't know anything about those.

This special lens ("tilt and shift") allows the vertical lines of buildings to remain parallel, even though the camera is "looking up". It's important to architectural photographers, but I confess I find it debatable which looks less natural, the enforced parallels, or the converging verticals which we are used to from normal cameras.

Rushdie and "napsterism"

"Anyone who thinks that fair pricing that allows authors to make a living is a cabal or cartel system is deep in the grip of Napsterism." - tweet by Salman Rushdie

I think Rushdie is arguing for the Agency Model. Which is the model that lets publishers enforce a price for a book, which was pressured on Amazon by the big publishers, no longer allowing them to put bestsellers for sale for under ten bucks, but letting publisher set a higher price if they wish. This model is now under attack legally, because it was enforced by a "cartel". 

The flaw in Rushdie's thinking here is, I think, that "fair pricing" fails to take into view that sales drop with higher prices, so maximum profit is found somewhere in the middle. It’s great that an author wants 20 bucks for his book, but if that price cuts sales by 80% compared to ten bucks, it helps him very little. 

Where the "middle" is, is of course the Question. One can get survey software which plot a bell curve based on a survey one makes and takes. 

The second flaw is that arguing against enforcement of high prices is hardly "napsterism", by which I take it he means that a person wants to get everything for free no matter what. That's quite a leap from "over ten dollars is too much for a normal ebook" to "I want to get all ebooks for free".

I'm not arguing against people's rights to set their own prices, that is of course a given right. And indeed Amazon's strategy, to buy books at full price and sell them at a loss to gain market share, is debatable from competition viewpoints, and certainly from their competitors' viewpoints! But it's a complex issue. 

"Thumbs Up" grip

This is one of those little great ideas that people come up with occasionally. According to many very experienced photographers, this little thumb support makes your grip, especially one-handed, of the camera way more secure.
They are not cheap, over $100, but I guess they have to be. They are mostly made for Leica, but I find it interesting that they have a model not only for the Fuji X100, but also one for the Fuji X10, saying a bit about this amazing little camera's status and quality.

You just plug the Thumbs Up into the hot-shoe and tighten it, and there's your thumb rest.

They don't show the X10 model seen on its own, but here is one of the models for Leica:

I often like to walk around with a wrist strap instead of a neck strap, having my camera hanging in my right hand by my side ready to whip up, so I imagine that this accessory would improve the grip in that situation too.